Acquire Today جريمة في ملعب الغولف Created By Agatha Christie Disseminated As Paperbound

ideile romanelor mele detective in timp ce spal vesela, Aceasta este o ocupatie atat de stupida, incat iti vine inevitabil gandul la o crima" spunea Marea Doamna a romanului politist, Agatha Christie,
Creatoarea celebrului detectiv Hercule Poirot nu ne dezamageste nici cu prezentul roman, propunandune un mister invelit in mai multe straturi de secrete, gelozie, intrigi, infidelitati si pana la urma moarte.

Poirot este unul dintre detectivii mei preferati si nu as stii pe cine sa aleg intre el si Sherlock Holmes, deoarece, pe cand deductiile lui Poirot se bazeaza pe psihologia umana, concluziile lui Holmes au la baza stiinta.
Mi sa parut interesant ca in acest roman Agatha Christie ii creaza un adversar lui Poirot, in persoana faimosului detectiv de la Paris Giraud, care este adeptul probelor materiale gasite la fata locului si pe care Poirot are ocazia sal ridiculizeze la sfarsit.

Mia placut faptul ca gasim o descriere amanuntita a lui Poirot din perspectiva prietenului sau capitanul Arthur Hastings: "Un omulet extraordinar! Avea inaltimea de un metru saizeci si doi, un cap in forma de ou, pe care il tinea un pic intro parte, niste ochi verzi care luceau cand era entuziasmat, o mustata de militar teapana si un aer plin de demnitate.
Era dichisit, ca un dandy, Avea o pasiune nemarginita pentru ordine, in orice forma ar fi fost, . . "Ordine" si "Metoda" erau zeitatile sale, Remarca foarte satisfacut: "Adevarata munca se face din interior, Micile celule cenusii aduti mereu aminte de celulele cenusii, mon ami, "
Am gasit in carte si o foarte interesanta metoda anti rau de miscare, deoarece detectivul sufera de aceasta slabiciune si pentru ca si eu am aceasta problema, la urmatoarea mea calatorie am so si experimentez.
Sper sa ajute, desi nu prea cred, "Metoda lui Laverguier" suna cam asa: "Trebuie sa te echilibrezi, daca iti aduci aminte, intorcanduti capul de la stanga la dreapta, inspirand si expirand, numarand pana la, dupa fiecare respiratie.
"
Mi sa parut simpatic faptul ca Hastings isi gaseste dragostea calatorind cu trenul si intalnind o domnisoara cu care aparent nu are nimic in comun si care "uita" sai spuna numele, aruncandui la coborare ca poate so cheme 'Cenusareasa'.

Ceea ce nu mia placut este ca desi cadavrul este gasit pe un viitor teren de golf, cartea nu are in rest nimic dea face cu golful, in ciuda titlului si mam simtit putin amagita deoarece miam imaginat deja ca arma crimei ar fi o crosa sau ca victima ar fi fost un faimos jucator de golf ori, de ce nu, ca cineva ar fi fost sufocat cu o minge de golf.
Imi pare rau, am prea multa imaginatie in ceea ce priveste crimele!
In incheiere atasez cateva citate memorabile, cu sau despre Poirot:
"Cei precum Hercule Poirot, ei sunt mai presus decat expertii! Lor le aduc expertii faptele, ei se ocupa cu stabilirea modului de

operare, cu deductia logica, succesiunea si ordinea faptelor mai presus de orice, cu adevarata psihologie a cazului.
"
"Unii dintre cei mai mari criminali pe care iam vazut aveau fete de ingeri, remarca Poirot cu voiosie, "
"Avem aici un indiciu un indiciu psihologic, Poate ca stiti totul despre tigari si chibrituri, monsieur Giraud, dar eu, Hercule Poirot, cunosc mintea umana, "
"Ieri era mademoiselle Daubreuil, azi este mademoiselle, . . Cenusareasa! Cu siguranta ca ai o inima de turc, Hastings! Ar trebui sati faci un harem, "
"Gandeste, prietene, spuse Poirot incurajator, Fati ordine in idei. Fii metodic. Fii disciplinat. Aceasta este cheia succesului. " I thought this was going to be about a golfer getting murdered,
SPOILER ALERT: It was not,



This was actually one of the wilder rides that I've been on with Hasting and Hercule, Every time I thought we had the murderer in custody, there was another switcheroo and we were back to Poirot chuckling under his breath and making everyone feel like an ass.

Honestly, all you need to know about the plot is that it is completely bananas,
But I totally dug the entire thing and thought it was a really refreshing story,



Also, Hastings meets his very own Cinderella in this one, So if for no other reason than that, this one is an important one for those of us who are into Poirot lore,

Recommended.
Read by Charles Armstrong, ltI prefer Hugh Fraser, but this guy was ok, Arthur Hastings! My word he was a lot to take here, I usually love him but Arthur made this one hard, Poirot is his very wonderful self but Hastings and his narration are all over the place, His penchant for having retrograde ideas about women caused a lot more trouble than they were worth and he hampered the investigation, I wanted him to leave which is terrible because he was relating the tale!

And yet somehow, Christie makes this a book I didn't want to toss across the room even though I desperately wanted someone, anyone, to throw Hastings in a bunker on the links and leave him there! It was a welldone mystery obvi and was just what I was looking for.
My next Christie mystery is going to have to feature Ariadne Oliver though, I'll loop back with Arthur later, It's early days for Poirot, who I love, A fun murder mystery full of twists and turns that only he can solve, Agatha Christie Book Reading Challenge

BOOK: OCT

,STARS This is a brilliantly written murder mystery by Agatha Christie, It is so cleverly done that I couldn't guess who the culprit was, There were interesting turns and plot twists that took me by surprise,

In this story our detective friend, Poirot has a rival a fellow detective, who is famous and much younger from Paris Surete, It was very interesting to read how these two different detectives collected clues and evidence and formed their own theories as to the mystery underlying the murder and who the culprit was while trying to outsmart the other.
But nobody can beat our brilliant Poirot, can they

It was also interesting to see that in addition to the detective work, Poirot engaging himself in a bit of matchmaking! :

Hastings, on the other hand, exasperated me to no end with his sentimental and witless inferences.
But I suppose he is indispensable to bring out the intelligence and cleverness of Poirot as well as to provide a little comic relief!

Overall, it was an enjoyable read.
And I'm becoming an Agatha Christie addict! The Murder on the Links is an early detective mystery by Agatha Christie, Originally, it had been published as a fourpart monthly serial in a magazine between Decemberand March, under the title of “The Girl with the Anxious Eyes”, before it was issued in book form by The Bodley Head in May.
It is the second novel to feature everyones favourite Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot:

“Height, five feet four inches, eggshaped head carried a little to one side, eyes that shone green when he was excited, stiff military moustache, air of dignity immense!”

The Murder on the Links could be thought of as “the French one”, as it takes place in northern France.
Additionally, the style is “highflown and fanciful”, as Agatha Christie readily admitted, owing something to “The Phantom of the Opera” author, Gaston Leroux, and even, apparently, theth century tragedian, Jean Racine.
She had based the book very closely upon a reallife French murder case, and one critic noted that some of the plot twists seemed to have been inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyles short story featuring Sherlock Holmes , “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”.
Hercule Poirots regular sidekick and amanuensis, Captain Arthur Hastings, is in place, and the setting leaves the field wide open to potentially antagonistic French professionals from the Paris Sûreté.


Writing about a talented amateur detective who reasons things out, accompanied by his rather more pedestrian sidekick, are certainly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes mysteries.
Contemporary reviewers at the time noted this, and compared the two favourably, Hastings of course plays the same role as Watson in the Sherlock Holmes novels, and Monsieur Giraud, the investigating officer in this novel and a detective of the Paris Sûreté takes the part of Inspector Lestrade.


“Two people rarely see the same thing, ”

To add a little spice to the action, Monsieur Giraud is arrogant, and resents Poirots involvement in the investigation, treating him with contempt as his rival.
To ameliorate this slightly, we have Monsieur Hautet, who is the examining magistrate, and assistant to Monsieur Giraud, He respects Poirot because of his reputation, and is therefore more helpful, These two are like amplifications of Inspector Lestrade, who has different attitudes towards Holmes at different times, in the Sherlock Holmes novels, Later on we are to meet Lucien Bex, the commissary of police for Merlinville, and Monsieur Marchaud, a police sergeant in his force,

Agatha Christie seems to revel in introducing new characters, to complicate matters even further, and this is just one example, None of these police officers is particularly pertinent to the plot, but the interchanges and frictions between Girauld and Poirot makes for most entertaining reading, We also enjoy the frustration experienced by Hastings, who occasionally bursts out with something like:

“I neither see nor comprehend, You make all these confounded mysteries, and its useless asking you to explain, You always like keeping something up your sleeve to the last minute, ”

The novel begins with Captain Hastings narrating in an amusing fashion about a train journey in which he meets a young girl, He is clearly attracted to her, yet has ambivalent feelings, as she seems to exemplify all the aspects of modern young women of which he disapproves:

“Now I am oldfashioned.
A woman, I consider, should be womanly, I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!”

She leaves without divulging her name, fancifully calling herself “Cinderella”.


The “case proper” begins with a message received by Hercule Poirot from a Paul Renauld, who has requested his help urgently, We are treated to an analysis of this letter by Poirot, who considers it deviously written, with a suspect addition, designed to ensure that Poirot would come, Sure enough, he is intrigued, and he and Captain Hastings travel to Paul Renaulds home, the Villa Genevieve, in MerlinvillesurMer,

But when they arrive, the local police have beaten them to it, Poirot is aghast to learn that Paul Renauld has been found dead that morning: stabbed in the back with a letter opener and left in a newly dug grave adjacent to a local golf course.


His wife, Eloise Renauld, is griefstricken but selfcontained, She tells a story of masked men breaking into the villa atam, She shows them the marks on her wrists where they tied her up, and says they took her husband away with them, Yet later, when she is asked to identify the body, Eloise is clearly overwhelmed afresh, and collapses with genuine grief at seeing her dead husband, which causes Poirot to ponder.


We meet Monsieur Giraud of the Sûreté, a confident young man who is leading the police investigation, and watch his pompous efforts to upstage Poirot.
Whenever Poirot picks up small details, such as piece of lead piping found near the body, Monsieur Giraud delights in mocking him, Poirot remains calm, although Hastings is most indignant at the way he is being treated, Monsieur Hautet, the examining magistrate, is less resentful, and more inclined to welcome Poirots experience, and even to share important information with him,

Poirot notes several facts about the case, including an unknown person who visited the day before, whom Renauld had urged to leave immediately.
Also, interestingly, Renaulds immediate neighbour, Madame Daubreuil, had placed,francs into her bank account over recent weeks,

In between the entertaining descriptions of Poirot by Hastings, we are introduced to various people connected with the family, The son, Jack Renauld, is not present, as he had been sent away on a trip by his father, possibly after an argument.
This leads to him being mistakenly suspected of the murder by Giraud, Jack has an interesting history, which may or may not be significant, He had been born in South America, lived both in that country and in France, and has a complicated romantic life,

Paul Renaulds secretary, Gabriel Stonor, seems keen to be helpful to both the police and Poirot, He had been absent in England at the time of the murder, and suggests his own theory, Because his employers past is a complete mystery, prior to his time in South America, Stoner suggests that blackmail may be at the heart of it, Certainly South America seems to keep cropping up in this story,

Doctor Durand is the local doctor and police surgeon in Merlinville, There are several servants: the elderly Françoise Arrichet, who was present at the Renaulds house during the crime, and Léonie and Denise Oulard, two young maids who are sisters, and had also been there.
In addition there is the gardener Auguste, who was not present,

Other key players are two neighbours, Madame Daubreuil, and her daughter, Hastings is taken immediately with the attractive daughter, Marthe Daubreuil:

“By Jove, Poirot, I exclaimed, did you see that young goddess ”, yet all Poirot see is that she has “anxious eyes”.


Madame Daubreuil is eventually revealed to be a Madame Jeanne Beroldy, who had been involved in plotting the murder of her husbandyears previously.
She had been blackmailing the victim, Paul Renauld, whose identity was also revealed to be an alias, He was Georges Conneau, who, with her connivance, had killed Jeanne Beroldys husband, but also escaped justice when caught, Marthe Daubreuil wants to marry Jack, for his money, and this is the motivation for her crime,

There are also two theatrical sisters, called Dubeen, who are acrobats, and their theatrical agent, Joseph Aarons, Bella Duveen is much talked about in the novel, Jack is in love with Bella, despite having split from her, and now being involved with Marthe Daubreuil.
Her twin is Dulcie Duveen, whom Captain Hasting is in love with, and only knows as “Cinderella”,

Captain Hastings is teased periodically by Poirot who observes that he seems to fall in love with every young woman he sees, Poirot promises him that “Papa Poirot” will find Hastings a suitable wife, We learn through Hastingss narration, that this, unsurprisingly, makes Captain Arthur Hastings disinclined to share confidences with Poirot, He attempts to conceal facts about his encounter with Cinderella which he considers irrelevant, but which actually prove to be material to the case, Of course, to our delight, Poirot discovers them anyway, Hastings has unexpectedly met “Cinderella”, once again, She is clearly able to wrap Hastings round her little finger, as she asks him if she may view the scene of the grisly murder, When she pretends to become faint, Hastings gallantly goes to fetch a glass of water, whereupon she then mysteriously absconds with the murder weapon,

Meanwhile, Poirot has travelled to Paris to research the Beroldy case.
On his return, he is shocked to learn that the body of an unknown man has been found, stabbed through the heart with the murder weapon, Oddly, it becomes evident that the victim, who has the hands of a tramp, died from an epileptic fit, before Renaulds murder, and had been stabbed after death.


We know full well that Poirot and Giraud will disagree about this latest development, and are not disappointed, It is also amusing to watch as Hastings switches between his loyalty to Poirot, and his worry that Poirot is actually making a fool of himself, We, the readers, of course have total faith in the diminutive Belgian detective,

Jack has come across as a very suspicious character, He admitted to police that he had argued with his father over wishing to marry Madame Daubreuils daughter Marthe, whom his parents found unsuitable.
Giraud therefore arrests Jack, and sends him to prison, on the basis that he wanted his fathers money,

Poirot however, points out that Renauld had changed his will two weeks before his murder, disinheriting Jack, Soon afterwards, Bella Duveen confesses to the murder, hoping to free him, Jack is immediately released from prison, The truth is that both are still in love with each other, When each came across the body on the night of the murder, each had assumed that the other was the killer, However Poirot reveals neither did, as the real killer had been Marthe Daubreuil,

During a couple of expositions, which use a whole chapter, Poirot relates the history he has discovered to Hastings, and explains his theory:

“Man is an unoriginal animal.
Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law, If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely, ”

Paul Renauld, or Georges Conneau, had changed his name in order to start a new life.
He had made a fortune in South America, married, and had a son, He then returned to France to settle down with his new family,

By a terrible coincidence, he found that his immediate neighbour would be his erstwhile partner in crime, Madame Beroldy, Just as he had, she too had changed her identity, and was now known as Madame Daubreuil,

Madame Daubreuil had made the most of the situation, and proceeded to blackmail Paul Renauld, To make the situation even worse, his son Jack apparently became attracted to her manipulative daughter, Marthe, An opportunity to escape Madame Daubreuils clutches had presented itself when a tramp died in the grounds of his home,

Paul Renauld had planned to fake his own death, With his wife Eloises help, he would stage his own kidnapping at night, He would use the pipe to disfigure the tramps body, and then bury both beside the golf course, before fleeing the area by train, To make absolutely sure, anyone who might recognise that the body was not his, for instance his secretary or his son was sent away, Then Eloise would be safe in falsely identifying the body as his,

Poirot had suspected that Eloise was complicit in the scheme right at the start, He had noticed that she only gave her true reaction to her husbands death when she saw his body,

However, Marthe had overheard Paul and Eloise Renauld discussing the plan, and realised that this would put paid to her own plan to marry Jack for his money.
She therefore followed Paul Renauld and stabbed him after he dug the grave for the tramps body, before he had retrieved it,

Having worked all this out, Poirot asks Eloise to openly disinherit Jack, in order to reveal Marthe as the killer, He does not take anyone into his confidence: not even Hastings, who remains nonplussed by this development as do we, Poirot had deliberately engineered events to make the killer try something desperate, thereby showing their hand,

Sure enough, in an exciting climax, Marthe attempts to kill Eloise that night.
Poirot had suspected that this might happen, but does not realise that her room has been changed, when Jack leaves her alone in the villa, By a sheer stroke of luck, Cinderella has insisted on going along with Poirot and Hastings, and in an astonishing feat of acrobatic skill and daring, she breaks into the upstairs room from outside, and saves Eloise.
The evil Marthe dies in the tussle,

At the end, Cinderella reveals herself to Hastings as Dulcie Duveen, Bellas twin sister, and it is heavily implied that the two will marry, Jack Renauld and his mother, Eloise, plan to go to South America, accompanied by the happy couple, And Marthes mother, Madame Daubreuil, neatly manages to disappear yet again,

“I had learned, with Poirot, that the less dangerous he looked, the more dangerous he was, ”

This plot is fiendishly difficult to fathom, and the murderer probably impossible to deduce, although the clues are all there, The story draws us in, with all the bantering oneupmanship between the various detectives, and the appealing subplot of Captain Hastingss true romance, We feel like giving a cheer when Poirots theories are revealed to be the correct ones, and the arrogant sneering Girauld is firmly put in his place:

“You speak of my manner to you being insulting.
Well, once or twice, your manner has annoyed me,
I am enchanted to hear it, said Poirot, ”

There is an excellent television dramatisation of this novel starring David Suchet, who has recorded all the Poirot stories, Hugh Fraser also regularly as Captain Arthur Hastings, Several of the details of the plot are different, but perhaps the most odd change is that the location has been switched to Deauville,

If anything, the plot is just a little too complex, but this golden age mystery deserves four for its entertainment value, Hercule Poirot was still a new character to the reading public, and one reviewer said he was: “a pleasant contrast to most of his lurid competitors and one even suspects a touch of satire in him.
”

This is still what springs to mind for the modern reader, who has the whole oeuvre of Poirot books to choose from, The plots of all Agatha Christies novels are ingenious, complex and satisfying, but in addition, these early novels are far more amusing and droll than any she wrote later, when her writing style seemed to become more mechanical.


Moreover, by now we are well and truly hooked into reading other stories chronicled by Captain Arthur Hastings, about his friend Hercule Poirot, the diminutive detective who solves case after case purely by using: “the little grey cells, my friend, the little grey cells! They told me.
”

“Arrange your ideas, Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success, ”.